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The Mendacious Media

Burl Ives, the renowned folk singer, notable for having recorded over 100 albums and popular singles such as Have a Holly Jolly Christmas and Ghost Riders in the Sky, gave a memorable performance as “Big Daddy,” in the movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

In the movie, Ives’ “Big Daddy” character, irritated by the chronic discord in his family, becomes absorbed with the word “mendacity,” in what he sees as the habitual deceit and lying that goes on, routinely, not only in his family, but in life in general. Mendacity can be so thick, he says, one can smell it, as a pungent odor.

Our national Media, at low depths in public opinion, seem indifferent to the loathing as they continue to jam public awareness with their bias and ideologies, and even hatred. If it’s not the paparazzi, it’s contentious reporters or commentators demanding that national and public figures submit to their boorish demands, not for truth, but in their attempts to humiliate. Public servants, their families, and their supporters become targets of the biased, partisan press, so base as even to search for “dirt” on the wife of recent Supreme Court appointee Kavanaugh. Ann Navarro of CNN had no hesitation to disgracefully ridicule the president’s wife, Melania.

This spirit of Mendacity has agitated our liberal, leftist media to produce an array of discredited, so-called experts, with dubious integrity and specious motives on their network talk shows. Their sole purpose is to foment resistance to our government, not for holding it accountable to the nation, but for self-interest and to smear leaders in power, while encouraging lawless, anarchistic, violent protesters like Antifa and Black Lives Matter to help their causes. One can smell the mendacity. It has been on the rise for some time now.

Not too long ago, former respected icons of the field, most notably Dan Rather and Charlie Rose of CBS, Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams of NBC have lost credibility and suffered career upsets for less than truthful reporting. The BrianWilliams, after blundering through some math questions suggesting that Michael Bloomberg’s $500 million campaign spending worked out to $1 million for each one of the 327 million people in the United States, insulted Dr. Birx, one of our country’s main leads on the Covid-19 crisis, insinuating she was protecting the President in his deficiencies in managing the crisis. Dan Rather, in an incredibly naïve attempt to discredit the military service of George W. Bush, brought his ivory tower down upon himself with his fabricated story. Sadly, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose admitted to the media’s utter failure, indifference, and lack of due diligence in vetting Obama, a virtual unknown at the time, and later not probing into the rising scandals in the Obama administration. NBC admitted to staging a fake crash test with the resultant fire of a General Motors pickup truck to discredit GM on one of their news programs for which they paid a hefty sum for the lawsuit settlement. Earlier mentioned notable personality of that news division, Brian Williams, was suspended from the network for lying in a resume on having been shot at in covering a military helicopter mission in Iraq. Worse still, none of the networks went into any depth on Hillary Clinton’s boastful, false claim that she had been shot at by a sniper on a visit to Bosnia.

In very recent reporting on the Covid-19 crisis , in order to reek panic on the American people, CBS News was found to be using video footage from an Italian hospital to describe prevailing conditions in New York. The Media Menace has become so unbalanced and unfair one can smell it.

In a shocking and in almost unprecedented audacity CNN, along with six other far-left media outlets (the Washington Post, Buzzfeed,Politico, the New York Times, NBC and the Associated Press) had sued for the release of the names and home addresses of all of the jurors in the trial of Paul Manafort, former advisor to President Trump. As Bre Payton at The Federalist pointed out, “publicly outing the names and home addresses of jurors is considered ethically questionable, as outlined in the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press.” It is malicious to expose jurors to the public spotlight against their will when they don’t volunteer, they are summoned and selected. It was a vulgar attempt by the media, most especially CNN, to bully and intimidate private, everyday citizen-jurors into reaching a verdict that was more to their liking. (John Nolte-Breitbart News 8/17/2018). Mendacity is all around us.

The impact journalism and the media has made on our national growth and progress has been vital and certainly the nation owes past journalistic efforts an enormous debt of gratitude. Times have changed, however, as Mollie Hemingway, formerly of The Federalist, now of Hillsdale College, contradicts the myth that President Trump’s demeanor created this hostile climate in the media, by rightly declaring that it wasn’t the president that created this media vulgarity, it was the media’s vulgarity that gave rise to the advent of Donald Trump. Indeed, countless other prevarications go on incessantly on media TV news, interview, and talk shows.